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Life After Gastric Bypass

I’ve received a few letters from some of the #SlenderSeekers out there that heard that I got up and left the room during the Lisa Lampanelli show at the WLSFA event the other night and wanted to know why, so I wanted to take a moment to explain.

We each have different paths and different journeys, we each arrive at different places at different times. For me personally my path and my personal mission is to help those that are affected by obesity to overcome some of the emotional challenges they face along the way and find a path to wellness through transformation of not just their bodies but their minds as well.

For those of you that know me well, I am an abuse survivor. Verbal and Emotional abuse was prevalent in my world through my childhood and teenage years. I was also affected by obesity at a very young age; I remember being that little “fat kid” that got picked on as early as first grade.

Each and every one of us has to be our own advocate for our own emotional wellness; we are the ones that are the most responsible for who and what we allow to reside in our emotional head space. As such, when I find myself in a situation where something that is going on negatively impacts my emotions I have a personal responsibility to address the issue.

Likewise, I have a goal, a mission, and a path that I am currently on, and if my involvement with something goes against that path, I have a personal responsibility to decide whether or not I wish to be involved with it. I have stood up in this community and said repeatedly that I will not tolerate fat jokes, fat shaming, weight bias, weight stigma or bullying. I do not feel that there is ever a time, social environment or population in which those things are ever tolerable, justified or acceptable.

My job as a Wellness Coach is to help my clients, who are affected by obesity to recognize obstacles and barriers that are in their way and to find solutions to problematic behaviors that are hindering their endeavors in weight loss in order to help them achieve their goals. I use these same techniques in my own life when trying to achieve my goals and if my goal is to be a positive beacon of light against weight stigma, weight bias and bullying, it’s contrary for me to sit in a room where those affected by obesity are the punchline to the jokes being told.

I used to be that girl who kids walked up to and said “You’re so fat when you go to Kentucky Fried Chicken you order the size on the roof.” I used to be that woman who teenage boys rolled down the window and made animal noises at when I walked down the side-walk. These things were not funny to me then and they are not funny to me today.

I understand humor as a self-defense mechanism as well as the concept of laughing at yourself so that others can’t laugh with you. We all build walls and defend ourselves from the things that we fear and the things that hurt us. I also understand that stand-up comedy has a certain kind of “expected offensiveness” to it.

There are many of my friends, dear friends, who stayed in the room and said that by the end of the show the comedian had turned it around, brought it to a place that was personal and allowed you to understand how much she cared about and wanted to help those that struggle with her weight, and it makes my heart smile that they were able to take that positive message away from it. I’m glad that there was a positive message to be heard if you waited for it.

For me personally, jokes that target people of size are never okay. If someone posted any of those jokes singularly in the social media as a community we would be outraged and I believe that if we create this gray area where sometimes it’s okay and sometimes it’s not, we weaken our stance in the fight against weight stigma and weight bias. If we say “It’s okay in this situation, but not this one or than one, we open it up for debate, but for me there is no debate, it should never be okay. That is why I had also left the room the night before when the MC made a joke that referenced the size of someone’s belt. For me personally, with where I am in my journey, I cannot sit and laugh while those affected by obesity are used as comedy content. Obesity just isn’t a laughing matter to me.

I have stood up several times and told you that I believe if you silently sit by and allow an injustice to take place that you have aided that injustice. So to me, if I tolerate even ONE joke that is weight biased I have done a disservice to my mission.

But this is MY mission, my path, my journey, and nobody else has to walk it with me. I am not upset, angry or against the WLSFA, the people in attendance or anyone involved with the event. I found myself in a situation that made me emotionally uncomfortable, that made me feel like I was betraying who am what I am by being involved and so I did exactly what I would recommend anyone else do in that position, I removed myself from the situation and went back to doing what I had come there to do; meet and greet and socialize with my friends.

There will be a few people out there who are upset with the fact that I have chosen to write about this, but as someone very special to me reminded me before I left Tampa, I’m not the type of person that lets fear of what others think drive me; I am fearless in my fight against obesity and I will always stand up and fight for those that are affected by it. Desperately Seeking Slender has always been a “I’ll shoot straight and tell you the truth, even when the truth isn’t popular,” sort of venue. And this time, the truth is that I’m not out to be popular. I’m out to win the fight against a disease that robs people of the health, their lives and their mobility and that Slender Seekers, is no joke.

Junk Food Junkies. It sounds comical but I am not kidding, and I am a recovering Junk Food Junkie myself.

First let’s start with the obvious. If something was labeled Deadly Doughnuts, Poisonous Potato Chips, or Toxic Taquitos would you eat it? If I was taking the label seriously I wouldn’t. And while these labels are fictitious, what we don’t recognize is that if it starts with something bad like “Junk” the truth is we already know what we are putting in our body.

Let’s talk a little bit about what this junk does to your body. You can pretty much bet that when we are talking about junk food we are talking about processed foods that are high in sugar. These types of food are very easy for your body to process, because they have already been over processed for you. And when you make things too easy for your digestive system to process guess what you do? You make your digestive system a less effective machine. Junk food is also often lacking in fiber, which also means we’re not using our intestines correctly–and did you know that your intestines are a muscle? What happens to muscles we don’t work out? They become weak. So what happens when we have a defunct digestive system and weak intestines?

Well, first digestion slows down and constipation can occur. Then there is the overwhelming amount of chemicals that are required to make the junk we’re talking about. All those long names you can’t say correctly on the nutrition labels, and of course one of our biggest enemies of all. Dare I say it aloud? Yup, the junk food devil itself: High Fructose Corn Syrup. Guess what your liver and kidneys try to do with these chemicals? It’s trying to process them, and it’s overburdened doing so.

Do you know what “junk food” mainly consists of? Junk food is usually high in fat, sodium and sugar, all of which can lead you to a mirage of health issues such as diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure and high cholesterol. High levels of sugar put your metabolism under stress and make your pancreas work overtime to give off enough insulin to prevent dangerous blood sugar levels. The high sodium in junk food can also have a negative effect on renal function and eventually, lead you to kidney disease.

And then there is the high fat in junk food. I normally like to avoid the word fat, I really do, but it doesn’t take a very far leap for us to understand that if we eat foods that are high in fat we are likely to gain fat ourselves. I’m not talking about the size of your clothes here folks; I’m talking about visceral fat gain. That’s the fat that is stored within the abdominal cavity around some very important organs like your liver, pancreas and intestines.

And do you know why this happens? Because junk food makes us lazy and lethargic because it doesn’t contain adequate amounts of protein or good carbohydrates (complex carbohydrates) and after consuming it your blood sugar levels drop which will often leave you feeling unhappy, tired and… craving sugar. Additionally high levels of dietary fat are known to hinder cognitive performance, so once again, leave us feeling tired.

So if we are constantly putting junk in, and the junk is sucking away at our energy levels, what’s happening? We lack the interest an enthusiasm to perform normal daily physical activities let alone the motivation to get in the exercise that we need in order to make any sort of progress in our weight loss journeys.

Often, I have been asked what I ate in a day when I weighed 420 lbs. My answer is usually “I ate junk.” And it’s not untrue. I try to go back and think about what a normal eating day was like for me then and it’s difficult for me. But I can say that I ate a lot of junk food. Jalapeno potato chips, candy bars, and spicy pork rinds were my go-to snack. McDonald’s, Jack-In-The-Box and Taco Bell were my favorite dinners. My vegetables came deep-fried, smothered in butter, breaded, and dipped in fatty dressing. Dessert wasn’t something I had once in a while; it was a nightly event in front of the television and usually consisted of a pint of my favorite flavor of ice cream.

I was a junk food junkie; I had to get my fix every day. And when I started feeling tired, lacking energy or was depressed, I turned right back to the very thing that was causing it.

If you have ever been around someone who struggled with sustenance abuse, the pattern isn’t all that different. I watched my “Family” abuse drugs most of my life. It didn’t matter that they were hurting their bodies. Acne appeared on their skin, sores took longer to heal, and they looked like they aged faster because it affected their skin elasticity. They started suffering tooth decay and losing their teeth, they were depressed, unhappy, miserable, and guess what they did? They’d spend their grocery money on an “8-ball” because they were addicts.

Often times, the weight loss community gets offended by this comparison. They don’t like being considered addicts; they don’t like their food addictions compared to that of a meth-head getting their fix. But in this community, I’m one of the first people who will say this to your face. Because I have no problem admitting that I was once a food addict and a junk food junkie.

I’m not here to sugar coat it for you or to tell you that it’s okay, and I won’t pat you on the back for eating pizza and jelly doughnuts. I’m here to educate you and help you along the way in your weight loss journey. I’m here to tell you the truth, even when you don’t like it.

Today’s truth: Junk food is two words that shouldn’t go together in the vocabulary of our weight loss journey. It is either

A. Junk: We don’t want to put in our bodies

B. Food: Nutritious fuel that we put in our bodies to make it perform.

It’s either A or B Slender Seekers. When it comes to unhealthy eating and junk food there simply is no “All of the above”